The KBI determined that Nick Rice was not the man who tried to torch a car on KU’s campus in July 1970. But following his death, local officials sowed doubt about that fact in public statements. Even five decades later, one former officer likened Rice to BTK or John Wayne Gacy.
Hours after Nick Rice was killed in July 1970, Lawrence police officer Jimmy Joe Stroud asked authorities if he’d be charged with shooting the teen. But then the coverup began.
Five decades later, Stroud still says “They didn’t have no evidence.”
Courtesy of Will Averill
Melinda Henderson was passionately involved in community affairs, most recently focusing on affordable housing and community issues. She died Tuesday at 68.
Some protesters tried to set a VW on fire as tensions rose on July 20, 1970. Lawrence police officers fired tear gas, then guns. Suddenly, Nick Rice’s fiancée realized Nick wasn’t holding her hand anymore.
Friends said Nick Rice was a nice, carefree guy who didn’t pay much attention to the unrest around him. So how did he get swept up in the tense protest at KU the night of his death?
A Lawrence Times investigation shows that Nick Rice was an innocent bystander when he was shot and killed by a Lawrence police officer on July 20, 1970. So why is there still so much ambiguity about his life and death?
Susan Wolfe
The small dresses in artist Liza MacKinnon’s exhibition, “A Kansas Childhood,” embody a meaning much larger than their physical size.
August Rudisell/The Lawrence Times
Crews were at work Thursday morning in Lawrence to determine how exactly to move a massive boulder in order to return it to its rightful owners.
Lawrence Preservation Alliance
A project to improve parking for Lawrence’s Amtrak station has unearthed a piece of the […]
A small pink flag signifies an answer 138 years in the making: the burial location of Pete Vinegar, one of three Black men lynched in Lawrence in the summer of 1882.
